


breaking the circle, taking the light

by strikinglight



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Breaking Up & Making Up, Closure, Falling In Love, M/M, Moving In Together, Moving Out, Non-Linear Narrative, Pre-Series, Roommates, with slight canon overlap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 17:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9247943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Tonight Yuuri’s fixing dinner in the kitchen, and Phichit’s in the bedroom alone. For now the room stands untouched. Their room, everything in it—two years of settling and all the odds and ends they’ve accumulated to break it in and make it home.There’s nothing to be done but to take pictures of it all, of course. First Yuuri’s side, then his, then a long view of the whole room that he needs to back all the way up against the far wall for. More than the way everything looks, it’s to save the stories too.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strangelyconflicted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangelyconflicted/gifts).



> For Keito, for always enabling me.
> 
> \----
> 
> And one day, when I need  
> to tell myself something intelligent  
> about love,
> 
> I’ll close my eyes  
> and recall this room and everything in it.
> 
> \- Li-Young Lee, “This Room and Everything in It”

It’s in the dining room after breakfast that Yuuri finally asks him, while they linger at the table finishing their coffee. They’re near the end of summer, and the whole room is warm.

“Do you like me?” It’s a small miracle he manages to get the question out in one go. But it’s delicate, addressed not so much to Phichit himself as to his hands, curled around his mug.

Phichit’s hands are just a little smaller than Yuuri’s, a little more slender too—the skin smooth, the fingers tapering. He doesn’t know how he’d talk about those hands if he had to, where to even begin.

It doesn’t matter that those hands have taken his before, or that he holds one of them in his own on the walk home almost every day now. It doesn’t matter that in the past two or three weeks he’s touched his lips to Phichit’s knuckles, the heel of his palm, the inside of his wrist, so many times it’s dangerously close to becoming a habit.

He can’t imagine how to even begin finding words for... that. For all of it. So it’s confusing and kind of unfair how much he needs them now, to make sense of things.

“For sure,” Phichit says, without hesitation. He must know Yuuri would need to hear it to believe. When Yuuri doesn’t answer Phichit reaches out for him, fingertips to the back of his wrist, resting gently. “Do _you_ like _me?”_

“You know I do,” he says. Phichit must know. But they’ve never talked about it, so it’s hard to tell. Yuuri looks up, across the table—and smiles, helpless. “You’re hard not to like.”

He hadn’t originally meant to say the last part. He’s worried Phichit’s going to laugh, but he doesn’t, for once.

“That’s okay, then,” Phichit tells him. And, softly, when Yuuri again says nothing, “I don’t want to make things hard.”

His fingers slide up, trailing little sparks across the back of Yuuri’s hand, wrapping around it and squeezing gently. In answer Yuuri does the one brave thing he knows how to do—he clasps their fingers together, squeezing back, hoping the contact will make him believe.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t want to go,” Yuuri says into the phone, voice a trembling rasp that cuts Phichit to the quick. “I don’t want to see anyone.”

Phichit puts a lid on the pasta that he has boiling for lunch, crosses the room to the window to turn his face up to the watery winter sun. It’s been snowing nearly every day since Yuuri left, so even this warmth is welcome, these small traces.

“Not even for a while?” he asks, willing his voice not to shake. “Not even for an hour or two?”

It probably hasn’t stopped snowing in Sochi, but he imagines there will be big chandeliers hanging from the ceiling at the ballroom in the big hotel, soft light, hot food at the buffet table, music. Parties exhaust Yuuri, he knows, but there must be something for him to smile at there. Or someone. Anything to make sure he stays warm.

“I wish you were here.”

“I am,” Phichit says. “Always with you, remember?”

Then it’s quiet between them for a while, no sound in the world but Yuuri’s breath in his ear from a continent away. Then, a knob turning. Water. Phichit closes his eyes and pictures him before the bathroom mirror in his hotel room—splashing his face, straightening his tie. Gathering the courage Phichit knows is there but he himself never seems to see.

“Maybe... maybe I can, for a bit,” Yuuri says, finally. “I’ll call you again after, if that’s okay.”

 _Come home soon,_ Phichit wants to answer. He catches himself, decides against both that and _Have fun,_ settles at last for, “Yeah, sure. I’ll be waiting.”

 

* * *

 

They kiss once and after that it’s like a door’s opened that refuses to close.

Sometimes Phichit will sneak one in the locker room, one hand already on the door that will let them out into the rink, light and quick as a breath Yuuri barely feels on his lips.

Sometimes it’s the door to their apartment clicking shut, locking all the light out, but not the sounds—the soft thump of Phichit’s back as it makes contact with the wall, his laugh bright and heady as Yuuri’s kisses cover his face and trail down the slope of his neck.

Even his eyes go to Phichit’s mouth so often each glance already feels like half a kiss, sketching out the shape of it speaking or pursed in thought or stretched wide in a smile that could light up the whole city. Then it’s all the more embarrassing to realize how bad he is at aiming for it with his eyes closed, finding his way by touch.

 

* * *

 

The last plane from Sochi’s due to touch down a few minutes before midnight Detroit time. Both Yuuri and Celestino had insisted the night before that Phichit need not bring the car around for them; he should get some rest, they could catch a cab back, easy, no worries.

 _Yes, worries,_ Phichit had wanted to say. He’d been all worries since the end of the free skate, two days ago. But he hadn’t known how to say it, couldn’t even imagine how to give that worry words, so he didn’t argue. He’d put on a smile he knew they’d hear, and said, “Okay. You guys take care.”

When Yuuri comes through the door at one-thirty AM, Phichit realizes he hasn’t gotten any of the words back. Instead he opens his arms, and Yuuri leaves his suitcase standing in the entranceway to cross the room and fall into them. They plop down together onto the couch—spent and diminished, but at least they’re together now, at least—

 

* * *

 

It’s the day Phichit picks up a Skype call from Yuuri’s mother, sometime in July, that Yuuri starts to wonder if he might be special.

(Special. For lack of a better word. A more specific word. _Special_ isn’t him, not even close, but it’s all Yuuri can muster up on a good day. On any other day, no words in any language he knows will do.)

He’s in the shower when he hears his phone start to ring. It doesn’t register right away why it suddenly stops; he needs to come out in a towel with shampoo suds feathering off the ends of his wet hair before he realizes. He finds Phichit sprawled out in _his_ swivel chair with _his_ phone in his hand, chattering brightly to _his_ mom about business at the onsen and how she doesn’t need to worry, her son’s a _fantastic_ roommate. The best-ever roommate—and here Phichit winks at him, and Yuuri has to pinch himself.

 

* * *

 

December becomes January, winter deepens, Yuuri gets good at disappearing.

Yuuri leaves early for class in the mornings, comes home always after dinner, sometimes closer to midnight. Phichit knows the university library doesn’t stay open past nine, but it’s easier these days not to say anything. He hasn’t known what to say that won’t make Yuuri’s eyes well up and his head drop down toward his chest. It’s been nearly a month already.

 _Don’t worry,_ the texts with his name on them read. _Don’t wait up._ Because Phichit can’t tell him to come home, he answers _Wake me up when you get back,_ instead. At the end of everything, _Stay safe, okay?_

Not everything falls through, of course. Some mornings Phichit wakes up to find the table set for one, the apple juice and the cereal all laid out, the oranges already peeled and segmented. On those days there’s food out for the hamsters too.

Some very late nights Phichit wakes up to the sound of the door opening—though maybe the truth is he’s only ever half-asleep these days, listening for it—and Yuuri will come in and sit on the edge of the bed. Phichit feels the mattress dip beneath his familiar weight and Yuuri’s fingertips card through his hair, tentative, hesitating.

 

* * *

 

Phichit drags Yuuri out to the animal shelter on a whim one Sunday. At the end of the day they come home with hamsters, an anomalous bonded trio the administrators give them for half the usual adoption fee, because three months they’ve been here and Phichit’s the only person who’s come in and said sure, they’ll take all three. (The look he gives Yuuri as he says this completely erases the words _but_ and _can’t_ from his vocabulary, for all of the ten minutes it takes to fill out the forms.)

Yuuri finds he’s not even surprised. The lady at the flower shop across the street’s always giving Phichit her stray blooms for free, and all he ever needs to do is smile at her. The flowers he brings home end up in strange places—in glasses of water on Yuuri’s nightstand, on his desk, pressed between the pages of his books.

 

* * *

 

Phichit knows that later he won’t remember what they even fought about.

Or maybe he’ll remember it as a bunch of small things, snowballing—a long day, too many flubbed jumps at practice, no more apples in the fridge even though Yuuri had texted that morning that he’d stop by for some after class, drop them at home in the afternoon before library time. Too many too-quiet mornings, too many nights in alone. The itching and scratching at the back of his mind that hasn’t stopped, since—

He’s still awake and thumbing through a book he needs to finish by the time Yuuri comes back that night, looks up from the pages and their strangely unintelligible words and finds the pale face, the tired eyes.

“I forgot your apples.” Yuuri’s whisper is directed downward, at the carpet, at his feet. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Phichit says, only for once he’s too tired to smile, and of course Yuuri’s not too far gone to pick up on something so strange. Too quickly “no, it’s not okay” becomes “yes, it is” becomes “I upset you” becomes “Yuuri, please, I’m tired” and Phichit doesn’t know how in the middle of all he stood up from bed and walked out into the living room, sat down on the couch and put his head in his hands.

It feels like hours before Yuuri comes out and sits beside him, though when he looks up the clock on the wall says exactly seven minutes have passed.

“I’m sorry,” Yuuri says, and “Please.” His face twists when Phichit reaches out to hold his hand, as if it might burn him. As if he’s already anticipating something about it will hurt. “You’re the last good thing about being here.”

Phichit takes both Yuuri’s hands in his and folds them between his own as gently as he knows how, but it still feels like twisting the knife.

“It can’t be just me, Yuuri. I can't—” He stops. Breathes. Begins again. "We can't do this on our own."

It’s their first fight. The world outside is big and the pocket of space they’ve carved out within these four walls is so small. Phichit feels all of these things so closely, looking at Yuuri across the couch, watching how he sucks in a long breath and lets it out again, shuddering.

“Maybe I should go home,” Yuuri tells him, at last.

 

* * *

 

It’s two AM. Yuuri knows Phichit’s awake, even if he’s turned on one side to face the wall and dimmed his phone screen to minimum brightness.

He knows this by now. It’s kind of a pattern—some nights he’ll wake up to go to the bathroom or get some water and he’ll see that faint glow, the hunched, inward-curving shape of Phichit’s shoulders as they bend to block out the light.

More than once he’s thought to say something. There’s no real reason why tonight is the night he finally does, except the little voice in his head whispering that if he doesn’t say something now, when will he?

“Hey,” Yuuri whispers. “Are you okay?”

Phichit’s phone goes dark; Yuuri hears the soft clicking noise as he locks it and pushes it under his pillow. There’s just enough ambient light from the lamps outside, from the unsleeping glow of the city all around them, for him to see Phichit turn to face him, though he can’t make out his face at all.

“Sorry,” Phichit says. “It’s afternoon back in Bangkok and the twins just got out of school. I’m a little homesick, I guess.”

Yuuri thinks he might get it. In the three years he’s lived in the States he’s gotten pretty good at calculating time differences, but the color blue’s never stopped making his heart ache just that little bit. So many times he’s walked along the river searching for the line where the sky comes down to meet the surface of the water.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Yuuri says, casting his voice outward like a net into the dark between their beds, “what’s your hometown like?”

In the glow of the streetlamps, a little more light—parted lips and the quick glancing flash of white in the darkness as Phichit smiles.

“Tell me about yours after.”

 

* * *

 

Over February they make plans to take the Big Departure and scale it down, turn it into a series of tasks on a list, small things they can get done bit by bit. They draw it up together, in whiteboard marker on the mirrored surface of one closet door.

_Get boxes. Take down posters. Clear desk. Give textbooks away. Sell printer. Book flight. Put beds back. Pack boxes._

It’s a long list by the time they finish. Phichit makes sure he draws in little squares next to every bullet, for Yuuri to check off one at a time.

Tonight Yuuri’s fixing dinner in the kitchen, and Phichit’s in the bedroom alone. They’ve agreed to start getting things done in the morning—Yuuri’s been fussing and fretting in particular about the printer, convinced it’s too old and beaten up and that no one will possibly want it, but Phichit’s told him time and again that he’ll put up an ad for it on Twitter, someone from school should definitely bite—but for now the room stands untouched. Their room, everything in it—two years of settling and all the odds and ends they’ve accumulated to break it in and make it home.

There’s nothing to be done but to take pictures of it all, of course. First Yuuri’s side, then his, then a long view of the whole room that he needs to back all the way up against the far wall for. More than the way everything looks, it’s to save the stories too. How Yuuri had blushed and stammered the night he’d asked if Phichit could please help him cover the wall in Victor Nikiforov’s face. The time one of the hamsters had somehow escaped the cage and gone missing for a full day, until they discovered the little nest it had made in one of the closets. The number of times they’d stubbed their toes and banged their elbows and nearly died, probably, pushing the beds together last-last September.

“So we don’t forget,” he says when Yuuri pokes his head in through the doorway, smiling over his shoulder, voice too light considering what he’s doing. “I’ll iMessage you the pictures or something.”

 

* * *

 

The apartment’s a mess, and remains a mess for the entire month of May. The boxes unpack themselves in fits and starts. Books accumulate on the kitchen counter, the dining table, anywhere but the shelves they’re supposed to occupy. A framed photo of Phichit’s little brother and sister—Isra and Chati, Phichit tells him, twins—ends up on the stovetop. Yuuri’s favorite stuffed dog—which he’s embarrassed to tell Phichit looks exactly like his real dog—somehow makes its way under the sofa.

(They search for the dog for two days and discover it somewhat by accident, lying on the carpet one evening exhausted and in vague despair. Yuuri’s convinced that if Phichit hadn’t turned his head to the left at the exact moment that he did it would likely have stayed there forever; he does his best not to be embarrassed at himself, imagining how inconsolable he would have been, how impossible to deal with.)

Along the way they uncover more and more quirks and patterns and embarrassing habits. Yuuri takes his notebooks into the bathroom and forgets them there. Phichit throws his clothes everywhere. Yuuri buys too few eggs when it’s his turn to go on grocery duty, Phichit too much milk.

(Or at least Yuuri’s habits are embarrassing. He’s hopped from roommate to roommate these past three years, convinced all these things make him difficult to live with. Phichit’s _should_ be embarrassing, exasperating even, but somehow contrive to be utterly charming instead, for reasons Yuuri hasn’t managed to put his finger on. Sometimes it makes him think, maybe, just maybe, this time—)

The best of Yuuri’s Victor posters are in the last box they open, carefully packed, rolled and quiet in their canisters. He wonders if Phichit would find him weird for putting them up—he doesn’t know enough yet to guess at the answer, so they stay in the box.

 

* * *

 

It’s weird how their room looks once they’ve finished packing—the beds pushed apart again, one half still cluttered and messy and lived-in, the other bare but for the boxes that line up like houses in a row on the floor.

After they tape the last box shut Yuuri straightens up and hugs him, arms circling his waist, squeezing. Phichit loops his own arms up around Yuuri’s neck and hugs him back, mumbles “it’s okay, we’re okay” in his ear across his next few stilted breaths.

 

* * *

 

It’s May, late spring weaving into early summer, and Yuuri’s in the elevator heading up, up to the new apartment, too fast and too slow at once. His throat’s tight from the nerves, his hands clammy as they always are on moving-in day.

 _The room at the end of the hall,_ the landlady had said, _you can’t miss it._ But Yuuri’s convinced he has it wrong when he reaches it and finds the door already open; he checks the number by the doorbell once, and once again, just in case.

When he pokes his head in there’s a boy in the entranceway, standing between a black duffel bag and a couple of boxes. He has his back to Yuuri and his phone out; Yuuri can see from the screen that he’s—for some reason—taking pictures of the place, even if there’s nothing there, not really, anyway. Nothing worth taking pictures of—

Then the boy’s turning to him, and Yuuri can see more clearly that he’s dressed for moving-in day—white shirt already kind of dusty down the front, old jeans hanging loosely, a tear in one knee—but more importantly that he’s smiling, and that as he slides his phone into his back pocket he also pivots on his heels and takes a couple of steps forward, one hand already out and ready to shake.

“Hi—Yuuri, right?”

The way he moves is so light his feet barely seem to touch the floor. The way he talks, too. Yuuri’s mouth goes dry; his hands are boulders by his sides.

There’s a little voice in his head building to a siren-wail, _You’re an idiot, Katsuki Yuuri, you’re an idiot you’re an idiot you’re an idiot of course Celestino must have told you his name idiot idiot,_ but somehow he manages to raise the right hand. But he forgets to wipe it down on the front of his pants— _idiot Katsuki Yuuri idiot idiot—_ but from the way that smile warms and widens at the contact, the boy doesn’t look like he minds. But—

“Phichit,” he adds after a pause, an answer to the question Yuuri hasn’t asked, and the little voice doesn’t disappear but it does slow down all of a sudden, go quiet.

_Phichit. Phichit. How do you spell that?_

“It’s good to meet you,” Yuuri says. He must mean it; he’s already kind of smiling back.

 

* * *

 

As a rule, cars can’t stay more than two minutes at the unloading area—a minimal amount of time to unload people and baggage, on the assumption that all the long goodbyes will have been said before even arriving at the airport—but Yuuri’s taking the last flight out, so traffic is light up the driveway.

He eases Celestino’s car in parallel to the curb, shifts gears into neutral so Yuuri can hop out of the passenger seat, pops the trunk open so he can get his things—one suitcase and a duffel, for his clothes and other valuables. The boxes, full to the brim with the rest of Yuuri’s life here, such as it was, Phichit’s promised he’ll send. He doesn’t drive off when he hears the trunk slam again, and it’s funny because Yuuri can’t quite tear himself away to head inside either.

At this point Phichit’s sure they’ve talked about everything they needed to talk about. Which is to say that on the way here Yuuri had reached for his hand and said _I’m sorry,_ and without taking his eyes off the road he’d squeezed it tight in his own and said _It’s okay. Don’t worry, it’s okay._

He’d also said _No goodbyes,_ because it’s true, he knows it for a certainty—after this they’ll still be them, in all the ways that matter. The nebulous _them,_ that becomes whatever they need, when they need it.

Yuuri had smiled at him then—faint and watery, tired and tentative, but if there’s anything Phichit knows how to do it’s how to tell a real smile from a fake one, and that had been Yuuri’s first real smile in an eternity and a half—so maybe he’d gotten those messages. Maybe he’d believed.

Now Phichit’s rolling down the window on the passenger side, because Celestino likes his windows tinted dark and that makes it hard for them to smile at each other across the gap, one outside looking in, the other inside looking out

“Text me when you get home,” Phichit says. It doesn’t matter that home is a moving target; home is an inn with a hot spring in an obscure country town in Japan, a place Phichit knows back to front without ever having visited it. Home _was_ a Unit X in a Building Y in a Residential Neighborhood Z in Detroit, Michigan, USA—a city that’s always been too big for just the two of them, opening out into a world that’s bigger still. Home can be anywhere, or anyone; that’s something they know now that they might not have before.

“I will. Drive safe,” Yuuri tells him. “Don’t dance too much on the wheel.” And Phichit knows he means it to be funny even if at the same time a little voice at the back of his mind will poking at him right about now, about car crashes and plane crashes, things getting destroyed. So he laughs, because he doesn’t know a better way to say, again, _Don’t worry._ Yuuri laughs along, just a bit; as the sound dies in his throat he leans forward and reaches in through the open window to squeeze Phichit’s shoulder.

When he straightens up again, there’s no need for any more words. Yuuri nods his head once and Phichit gives him a jaunty little salute before he gearshifts back into drive, puling away from the curb—watching in the rearview mirror as Yuuri gathers his things and walks through the automatic doors into his next departure, willing him enough courage not to look back.

 

* * *

 

One night in April, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room with his back to the door and the house quiet around him, Yuuri calls him.

It’s the first time he’s called since the day he touched down, a month ago now—and that had been five minutes in the arrivals lobby at Saga Airport before walking out to catch the train to Hasetsu, just long enough to say _Hi I’m home I got in okay are you okay?_

To be honest, he’d been afraid to call again, worried that he’d start thinking too much about what to say, that thinking so much would make him panic. Which is still the case now, except he’s already panicking over something completely different, and it’s making his hands and his mouth run so far ahead of his brain he barely knows what he’s doing when Phichit’s face winks into view on his screen.

“HE’S IN MY HOUSE AND HE’S NAKED!”

To say the least it’s the last thing Phichit expects to hear when he picks up the call at the dining table as he’s sitting down for breakfast. He’s in the middle of peeling an orange, picks up his phone with fingers still slightly sticky with juice, somehow manages _not_ to drop it into his bowl of cereal as he untangles the frantic hooting that follows— _Victor, video, naked, onsen, house_. The words _naked_ and _house_ come back around four or five more times.

That’s it, that’s the story of Yuuri’s life this past month, apparently. Phichit doesn’t know when he started laughing, sunny and loud and so natural that Yuuri too forgets everything around him, everything he’d been saying on his last rattling exhale—then he’s giggling a little too, and then a lot. There’s an ache in his ribs whenever he tries to breathe, every inhale a punch to the gut. But it’s a good pain, if that makes sense. It’s an ache that feels good, somehow.

“Hold on,” Phichit says, leaning one elbow on the table, wiping imaginary tears from his eyes. “Back up. What time did he show up?”

“I don’t know? Like six this evening?” Meaning two AM Detroit time. It’s seven-something now, eleven-something at night in Hasetsu. Of course they do all the math in an eyeblink, both of them, without even thinking about it. “I didn’t exactly check!”

“You mean he’s still naked right now? After five hours?”

“I... I don’t know.” Yuuri realizes only belatedly that he left out the part where his father had come into the onsen with a robe for their surprise guest. And the part where his mom had served katsudon for dinner. All evening his head’s felt exactly like the inside of a washing machine—a little bubblier now that Phichit’s here and laughing with him, a little less spinning-around-at-high-speed, but still so dizzying. So strange he can barely believe anything that’s happened. “I hope not.”

Across the ocean, in an apartment that used to be home—that’ll be _his_ home for less than a month more, as he waits for the lease to run its course, except in the midst of all the Victor-related excitement he hasn’t had the chance to tell Yuuri about that yet—Phichit’s laughter has settled, but he hasn’t stopped smiling. Maybe _beaming_ is the better word for what it does to his face, pulling his mouth so wide it almost hurts, but it’s good. So good to feel the days alone fall away, find the light that’s always been waiting there beneath. It's the light they see their way in the world by, the one that never goes out.

“He might still be, Yuuri. Go check the guest room.”

_“Phichit!”_

And at the end of everything it’s almost too funny to believe—opposite sides of the world and two continents between them and somehow they’ve still managed to catch each other in their pajamas.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. A confession: The seed of this fic was [the random brain-vision of an imaginary moving-in-and-simultaneously-moving-out AMV](https://twitter.com/delicadenza/status/816999787157278720), which I yelled about so much on Twitter it became physically impossible not to write it anymore.
> 
> 2\. I owe most of the inspiration for the way the timeline behaves and the alternating perspectives to the musical _The Last Five Years_ , which makes use of more or less the same devices--a relationship narrative told from the perspective of both partners, except for one the story is moving forward in time and the other in reverse. Except I've chosen the end, rather than the middle, for the point at which the two POVs converge. (I'm sorry for any headaches this might have caused. That's more or less what's happening, if you needed to know--Phichit going forward, and Yuuri backward. At the end, they meet.)
> 
> 3\. As an additional time clarification, my general loose headcanon is they roomed together for about two years. So the winter timeline (Phichit's) is the months leading into the canon timeline, and the summer timeline (Yuuri's) is the summer of two years prior. More or less.
> 
> 4\. The title is lifted from one of the songs from the same musical, "Shiksa Goddess."
> 
> 5\. As a kind of postscript, I want to think that Phichit takes his hamsters with him when he returns to Bangkok in May, rather than that they die or he rehomes them. In my distress of course I had to go and Googled it, and was happy to find that [such things are possible](http://hamsterhideout.com/forum/topic/65044-hamster-friendly-air-travel/).


End file.
